The sea Mons: scientists have solved the mystery of the lone cryovolcano – Popular Mechanics

the Sea Mons, whose height is about 4 km and rises above the surface of Ceres as a huge finger. To date, this ice volcano is the largest on the dwarf planet. This is the only ice volcano, and it’s weird: volcanoes very rarely occur one by one. For a long time, this isolation was a mystery to scientists, but now they are sure that they know the answer: the fact is that the rest of the cryovolcano was destroyed.

Millions of years ago on Ceres was probably a lot of spewing ciomaga formations. However, according to scientists, the bumpy volcanic planet’s surface simply leveled over vremeni. Not erosion as the mountains and volcanoes on the Earth, but simply because the cryovolcano… emerged from its shape.

because Of the so-called “viscous relaxation”, even dense matter can spread. Rocks, for example, has too large a viscosity, and therefore will not melt under normal conditions, however, even without the ice melting can “relax” the structure to change its shape. By the same token, moving glaciers on our planet. On Ceres, which mainly consists of water ice, flow can the entire surface.

a Similar process can change the shape of the surface and other ice planets and planetoids, such as Titan, Triton, Europa and Enceladus. But clearly we can observe the effect of alignment on Ceres, whose ice body is drawn closer to the Sun. The study’s author, Michael Sori, said that solar heat played a role. “It’s as if you put a jar of honey in the microwave: honey will spread much faster than at room temperature”, he explains. Sori and his colleague say that relaxation can take millions and even hundreds of millions of years. On Ceres are not so many active processes, there is no atmosphere or tectonic activity, so this explanation seems the only true astronomers.

the Team suspects that the Sea Mons, being by the standards of the volcanoes is still quite young (it is only 200 million years) have just not had time podvergalsya relaxation. Now scientists are busy looking for other potentially deformed cryovolcanism, and they already have a suspect. At the base of the Sea Mons is clearly visible dome-shaped swelling, which can be another cryovolcano, whose age is about 500 million years.